American Astronaut Quotations

It's been a long way, but we're here.

There were different challenges along the way. Certainly the food shortage was unpleasant.

One of the jokes on our flight is that, if we have a normal entry day going, the plan is for me... to actually take the orbiter first and fly it for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and then hand it on over to Scooter.

This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century.

The flight was extremely normal... for the first 36 seconds then after that got very interesting.

And, I was really impressed with how beautiful our country was and how friendly the people were.

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Roger. Clear the tower. I got a pitch and a roll program, and this baby's really going.

Our task was doing maintenance and repairs to keep the station in a good state for the return of the shuttle flights and resumption of major ISS construction.

The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth.

So, whenever Scooter was the Pilot, he never had a chance to fly the orbiter. So, the joke is: I'm going to have a chance to fly it first and hand it over to him.

I saw the booster, not Sputnik, flying by, and I said, maybe this is the way we should be going, not just sitting back waiting for something to happen.

Rendezvous day is the third day of our mission, and that's a big day for us.

We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.

Well, it's still a bit uncertain, but I will do the consulting, and I'll see how I can contribute. But I'm sure whatever I do will involve the space program. That's where my passion is.

And, actually it was interesting because I had done a lot of traveling in the United States and Canada and Mexico on my motorcycle; and I was really, it was the first time I had really gotten out of the Minnesota area to speak of.

I would have taken whatever hand I was dealt. Space was it.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine.

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

At the end of our NASA careers, no one had a place for us in the military.

I didn't wish those tragedies upon the people who played them out. It was certainly tragic for them, but not for me. All of those things brought me to where I am. Without those things, I couldn't be who I am, I wouldn't be here.

But a lot of that kind of work is done pre-flight, coordinating efforts with the flight directors and the ground teams, and figuring out how you're going to operate together.

I was a little concerned with how the crew was going to view me because I didn't know whether this program had been kinda forced down their throats. But they were wonderful.

I spent a lot of my time working in the American module, and he would stay in the Russian segment working on his things, and we'd meet up at meal times. So it actually worked out very well.

We trained for a lot more malfunctions than any ever happen.

We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.

When you talk to crews that went to Mir or have gone up to International Space Station, they say that you go through different phases of adaptation or getting used to the space environment.

We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can't imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!

I can't think of anything that's as exciting as I'm sure this mission will be, and actually being in space. But, we did some training as a crew together.

The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.

We're incredibly lucky to be able to be working where we are up above the Earth and being able to see our planet from that vantage point.

We're doing a multitude of different scientific experiments on orbit on things that are only possible to be done in the space environment.

Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as scientists.

We developed already, before the first servicing mission, this has been further developed on the second servicing mission and we refined it this time, all the terminology.

Of course it's exciting to be in space, exciting to look down at the Earth and perform the science experiments and maintenance work.

Obviously, as a jet fighter pilot, everybody looks forward to the ascent; all that power, you know, that seven million pounds of thrust going uphill.

On one hand, to be able to go from one direction in the sky to study such an object to another direction to study another object, and on the other hand to be able to maintain accurately the position in space.

I have fought the centrifuge ever since. When I visited Star City in Russia, I told them, you guys don't need a centrifuge, they are a waste of time.

I feel very privileged to be part of this mission, and when my nomination was announced, I was really very, very happy to be selected for this mission.

If a man will make a purchase of a chance he must abide by the consequences.

I would truly love to see us go back to the Moon and on to Mars; certainly the shuttle is not the right vehicle to make that happen.

It is going to be an experiment of how it works, and I see I have all reasons to believe that it will work fine. But it's a short time. And we also have pushed the envelope here a little beyond what has been done in the past.

I think a lot of people, myself included, like to be... like to do expeditions and trips. To me, this feels a little bit like a motorcycle trip.

My parents always tried to teach us the best of both, the Chinese ethic of hard work and education and the American ethic of innovation of aspiration.

I thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.

We have overcome the notion that mathematical truths have an existence independent and apart from our own minds. It is even strange to us that such a notion could ever have existed.

You are an extremely valuable, worthwhile, significant person even though your present circumstances may have you feeling otherwise.

We have the Fine Guidance Sensors, one of which we will exchange out of three. Another one we changed on the last servicing mission, and on the fourth servicing mission in 2003 or 2004, the third one will be exchanged.

Well, let me tell you: when I'm in space, I'm looking forward to looking back and seeing the Earth. I just can't imagine what it looks like.

We have managed to hang in for 55 years, which isn't bad. My wife says our marriage has lasted so long because I was away half the time!

Exploration really is the essence of the human spirit, and to pause, to falter, to turn our back on the quest for knowledge, is to perish.

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

Within NASA, there were lots of things that were not appropriate to bring out to the public, because the press did not handle it well.

The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing.

I've always been, since I was fairly young, I've been interested in motorcycles and have owned them and ridden them and raced them, things like that.

Sometimes people here can get so focused on, Oh, I've got to get a flight, that it becomes the end all of everything. Then they go off and fly a couple of flights and they think, Okay, is that all there is in life? No, it's not. There's a whole big life out there.

The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it.

The moon is essentially gray, no color. It looks like plaster of Paris, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.

Apollo was just too big, like flying a big transport airplane, which fighter pilots don't really revere. Gemini was just about the right size.

As a Naval officer, I was trained, essentially bred, to be a military aviator. I was a Naval officer on assignment, not an employee of NASA.

I took care of the rabbits, of course, because I was the farm boy who could do magic with animals. I can still do anything with animals.

It was only after we got the first maneuver off that I began to enjoy the outside view. We actually could see the external tank out in front of us.

I touch the future. I teach. That's going with me.

It's all done by computer. The jets will fire and it'll just be in the attitude that we need to have it in to come back to Earth.

For landing, we came in over Edwards about 40,000 feet. We set up for a big circling pattern coming in to land down on the lake bed.

The New Testament tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are to deal with them in terms of God's law. We owe them such fair dealing.

It's very important, especially during a Hubble mission, that we have a lot of photographic evidence of the condition of the telescope.

I try to tell the people that are sort of new here when they come in and do their flights and whatever, the things that you remember most after your flights are the interactions you've had with your crew. Those are the most satisfying things you take away from a flight.

So even though we were there competing with each other for the first ride, we were still acting as a team, and helping each other in those days.

I'm expecting to have a lot of fun. I'm expecting to be tired at the end. But I'm expecting it to be the experience of my lifetime so far.

In Mercury, you couldn't translate. You could just change attitude. But you were actually flying it like a flying machine in Gemini.

In a way, what we do is not totally different from some of the tasks that will be performed for the assembly of the International Space Station.

I had, before I went to college, I had taken a few years off after high school and really had, I guess in those days, I had no intentions of going to college.

I think a benefit is that we try to put it up in a short time. From the decision to do this mission until we fly, it's six months and one week or so, so it's a very short time.

But it's also a lot of hard work, and it's a long time to be away from your family and friends. So I had a lot of different feelings.

But, I have to tell you that, astronauts, rookie astronauts after they land, they say that they found the training to be more than adequate.

I didn't think that, as a Swiss, it was possible to do that, although I was really dreaming to do that. It was an impossible dream.

I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before.

This is a kind of a personal message from me, and that is that teachers are good communicators, they do an important job in our society.

You can see these boxes which are covered with metal foils for thermal reasons, and they are also, most of the time, thermally controlled inside to keep reasonable temperature inside each of these containers.

The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated.

The computer that is presently on board is a relatively old computer that has limited capability in terms of its speed and its memory capacity.